Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday June 08, 2013 @02:41PM
from the that-sounds-like-a-weird-baby dept.

MojoKid writes "Dell recently combined two trending PC design styles into a single system and called it the XPS 18 Portable All-In-One Desktop. The machine has all the power of an AIO desktop system and some of the portability of a tablet. To be clear, Dell isn't suggesting you'll want to tote this thing across town in ways that you might use an iPad. It's portable in that you can snatch up the 18.4-inch Full HD display from your home office and take it to the living room to switch gears from Google Docs to gaming with the kids, or take it upstairs for some late night surfing before bed. ... The main attraction, however, is that the PC itself is a portable display featuring an 18.4-inch IPS panel with a 1920x1080 resolution and full touch support. Performance-wise the XPS 18 holds its own versus mainstream all-in-one touch PCs, but with added ability to pick the 5 pound system up go virtually anywhere with it on a moment's notice."

A weak dual core CPU that's more power hungry than an ARM CPU, a battery that'll last an hour in real-life conditions within a year, a weight that makes it a pain to lug around, a size that makes hand holding it or carrying it anywhere a joke -- despite having lower resolution than an iPad or a Google Nexus 10, a small 32GB SSD that'll be more than half filled by Windows 8 which nobody wants of, a flimsy to stand it at an angle that'll break and can't be replaced. And again, you're stuck with Windows 8 whic

Horrible idea and will never sell. No one wants a 18.5" 5lbs screen in their lap. How do I know? How well have laptops over 17" been selling? How well have laptops over 4 lbs been selling lately? Exactly. Future is tiny, lightweight tablets/phones that you carry in your pocket and then dock (wirelessly hopefully) to large, cheap LCDs when you reach your destination. I'm almost there, 2 lbs 11" multitouch dell latitude xt docks with two large LCDs at home and office.

Totally disagree... My wife recently got one and absolutely loves it. It's absolutely great to watch movies on in bed. It's fast enough for email, internet, etc. The screen is gorgeous. The dock is awesome. And to the guy who says it doesn't have wireless... it has N...

I can't understand why companies would want a Slashvertizement. Invariably the first comment slates the product and the rest of the discussion then goes on to tear it apart. People only come to Slashdot for the comments since the news is available elsewhere.

Portable desktop? Just a marketing gimmick. It's too underpowered to be a desktop.

Too underpowered to be your desktop, that is. Or mine. Or most of Slashdot's. (But then, so are basically all All-In-Ones and pre-builts.) But to the "average" home user who only uses a computer for email and web browsing, it'll be sufficient.

It's an interesting idea, but not practical for my use and costs more than I'd be willing to pay for such a thing.

Too underpowered to be your desktop, that is. Or mine. Or most of Slashdot's. (But then, so are basically all All-In-Ones and pre-builts.) But to the "average" home user who only uses a computer for email and web browsing, it'll be sufficient.

A lot of home users expect to be able to play video games. After the email/web is done for the day, they turn the system over to their children. A friend of mine recently wanted to purchase a desktop. His personal requirements were modest [as you mentioned], but he wanted his 8 year old son to enjoy/use the system. So, we had to go up a notch or two to get a gaming system.

The Dell system is too bulky relative to its power. The detached keyboard is just an extra item to lug around. Because it's running

Umm... no, we haven't. Existing all-in-one desktop PCs, or even 18" (~45cm) laptops, have weighed way more than 5lb (about 2.3kg). Usually more than twice that; 11-20lb (5-9 kg) is more common amon AIOs. Even if they were designed with a carrying handle, they were not designed with portability in mind; the handle was to make it easier to get the from the box to the desk. Additionally, while consumer touchscreen monitors have existed for a while now, they haven't generally been designed for any kind of porta

Sure, but your laptop probably also has an Ethernet port, external monitor port, internal optical drive... (and not Windows 8)...you know, things that help make it useful all around. Perhaps these things are not important to everyone, though I don't use wireless, so an Ethernet port is pretty useful for me.

I''ve literally not once used the optical drive in that work machine; ISOs and bootable flashdrives are much more convenient and all the software I need is downloadable anyhow. The ethernet I rarely use, but if I needed it on a device the doesn't have it (like my tablet), I'd grab a USB NIC.

WiFi is fine if you run it through a VPN, which is required for my work anyhow.

They paid for the privilege? With that said a) it's as funny as fuck to watch all the apple flacks freaking out and b) when will tablet manufacturers just bite the bullet and come up with a pull-out superthin keyboard for tablets? I mean really it's not exactly a tough engineering problem.

I considered the Slider to be an experiment by ASUS based on the popularity of the original Transformer. It tested whether the G1 / 2 (also really popular) form factor would work at a larger scale. It didn't.

Windows 8 was NOT "designed for a touchscreen". It is Windows 7, a non-touchscreen OS, partially updated to be touch-enabled. The first layer or two has been revamped to work reasonably well for touch, to the detriment of 'regular' mouse/keyboard use, but lots of it hasn't been redesigned to be used with touch, keeping existing small controls which are designed to be easily [for most people] to interact with using a mouse, but much more difficult to properly select using your finger.

I am curious about cooling of this thing. Something tells me that cooling will be compromised if I take this 5 pound 20 inch board to my bed. Unless I misunderstood "taking upstairs...before bed..."...

I'm going to try one out. The home computer form factor is going to change. I have tried the Asus Transformer and like it. The removable keyboard works great but to be a primary home computer it needs to have a larger display and larger keyboard. I was hoping Asus they would release something in the 15-17 inch range in the Transformer series but I don't think that has happened yet. The Dell XPS18 is a bit larger than I was thinking but it is getting decent reviews so I'll give it a shot... it will be my first shot at Win8 too (sigh). Sure it isn't a lightweight but its no Sony Tap 20 @ 11 Lbs.

FWIW, the Windows logo on the XPS 18 is the updated version of the Super (Windows) button, and it's an active part of the tablet. Pressing it returns you to the Start screen so that you can change programs or launch something new (or hide you pr0n from the GF when she walks into the room). The button exists on all Win8 tablets because MS requires it.

Yeah I didn't mean it was heavy. Hopefully they get touchscreen weights to very competitive levels and we'll see things like a 15" or 17" Transformer. AIOs like the XPS 18 sub 4 LB with some of the features it is currently missing (HDMI out, eSATA, etc)

...and its hurting them across the board. Ironically the exception was the launch of the original ipad which started at $500 the device closest to this one...and (stupidly) its latest model is still that price.

Obviously you could choose an Android device and cut another $200.

People forget what relatively good value the iPad was for a launch device.

A 21" screen without touch, in a vastly more heavy case that doesn't have a battery, in a machine that can't be operated without (realistically) both mouse and keyboard.

I don't deny that Apple doesn't have any equivalent of this thing, and thus the GP's post was silly, but that base model iMac costs almost as much and yet is missing all of the things that are designed to appeal about this computer. It really is a giant tablet which is designed to also be used like a desktop (contrast with the Surface Pro, a

I don't deny that Apple doesn't have any equivalent of this thing, and thus the GP's post was silly

Indeed.

As to touch screen the iMac is indeed lacking it. But it's uselessness of a touch screen for a desktop OS is demonstrated by the photo of the product on the first page of TFA. What's that sitting next to the keyboard?

If Microsoft had pulled off Metro as a new interface for Windows, maybe this product would have a point. But the reality is no one likes Metro, and Microsoft is having a rethink of the software and (another) re-org of the company in order to change direction.

The Apple WiFi hardware and TCP/IP stack is so much better than
others.

I had need for a second 5Ghz link and hung a $100 little apple box off to the side of
my Netgear box. I ended up turning the power almost off for both 2.4 and 5Ghz radios
of my Netgear box. The single Apple 5Ghz link is all I need when I thought I needed
two for streaming media.

I suspect it is antennas and software... nothing impossible for others to do but cle

30 years ago Apple sold the equivalent of this, one of the first machines that could easily be transported and used at the home or office, and it cost $5,000 in todays dollars. It was 16 pounds, could be packed up in less than five minutes, and it was the status symbol to be carrying it through the worlds airports.

Computers and the movement away from terminals meant that there was a market for a single machine that could be used at home and the office. The Osbourne tried to meet this need before the Mac

I presume you're taking about the Lisa, which was an utter flop. It also was nothing like this, except that it had an integrated enclosure and screen and was based on a graphical UI (which was about the same as the Macintosh, if that's what you meant). It was not portable, it was not battery powered, it did bot have a large interface, it was not a tablet form, it was not color, it had no touch screen.

Actually there are two niche markets for these, with side markets which will come on line when the price get

This seems to be a mediocre, unnecessarily page-broken review of a machine with mediocre hardware specs. Did I miss anything important?

Yes using Auto-pager. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autopager/ [mozilla.org] I don't know if there is an equivalent in other browsers, but it automatically loads next pages when you reach the end of a page...and I rarely get this problem of page-breaks. It used to work on the mobile firefox version.

Because it's not a desktop. It's a giant portable (laptop/tablet/whatever - in this case, tablet) which can be set up on a desk. The common term for this class of device is "desktop replacement" and implies high-end laptop specs plus a large screen, intended to remove the need for an actual desktop while still being something you can put in a backpack or briefcase and take on a plane, or remove from your desk and take to a meeting, or walk across the office to show something to a co-worker, or take to lunch

It's 1920x1080, which is the same resolution of just about every monitor up to 27". So unless you want to step up to a rather bulky 27" (or 30"), there really isn't any benefit of the larger screen other than wasted desk space.

I've always thought it was a bad idea to build the computer into the screen. The problem is that when the computer becomes outdated, you have to dump a perfectly good screen. I have LCD screens that I've used for many years with different computers as I upgrade the hardware.

That's one side. The other side is of the traditional separate component PC is the tangle of cables cascading down the back of the desk onto the floor, which typically doesn't get touched by anyone who vacuums, resulting in a long standing pile of detritus and dust.

It also means you can't easily pick the computer up and take it to another room, or put it in the car to take to another place, when you want.

And finally reusing a screen means you don't get the benefit of the latest screen sizes or resolutions.

I can't even go out and buy an LCD that's as high resolution / pixel density as the two CRTs I just gave away (20" visible, 2048 x 1536)

And yet rather than keep them and use them you gave them away, buying an LCD instead. So your implication that screens haven't got better is given the lie by your own actions.

Yes there are other improvements beyond "screen sizes and resolutions" that one would miss out on when reusing a monitor from an old computer. The size advantages of LCD over CRT was one. And resolution comparisons between the two aren't quite as simple as you suggest. LCD enables sub-pixel rendering. That wasn't possible on CRT.

In theory, subpixel rendering triples horizontal resolution, boosting 1920 pixels across to 5760. In practice, because of the low-pass filtering needed to avoid color fringing, it boosts perceived horizontal resolution by 50%, giving the equivalent of 2880x1080 for a 1080p monitor. It's analogous to how 480i is blurrier than 480p because of the filtering needed to avoid interline twitter. Because the vertical dimension has no subpixels (at least in monitors that don't pivot), it doesn't make smaller point s

...what does this mean? ? ? that it's possible to rig your text antialising based how the subpixel rgb layout is on the screen?

why wouldn't you in theory be able to do the same kind of shenigans with a crt? except that you didn't need to because the text looked ok anyways.(if it's oversampling that you mean.. then again, why not on crt?). so why bring this up as an advantage when having to do it is a disadvantage.

personally the reason why I prefer lcd's is that most crt's I ever saw had notable change in ge

Go look on eBay for 27" IPS panel monitors. $400 gets you a 2560x1440 resolution monitor. Sure, they are Korean no name brands, but there are plenty of reviews out there that can tell you which ones are good.

Wy spend $400? Mine $298, DHL Express shipped (two days from Seoul to the US west coast), and they even included the AC plug adapter (mains adaptor to our overseas friends). Seller had many thousands of positive reviews; it was one of the best transactions I've ever made online.

It also means you can't easily pick the computer up and take it to another room, or put it in the car to take to another place, when you want.

To carry a game console into another room, you shut it down, disconnect the power and video cables, move it, connect the power and video to the other monitor, and turn it on. The procedure for a slim PC is no different, especially for a Wii-sized Mac mini or an Xbox 360-sized Acer or Gateway. But you're right that such a use case is often limited to 1920x1080.

The other side is of the traditional separate component PC is the tangle of cables cascading down the back of the desk onto the floor, which typically doesn't get touched by anyone who vacuums, resulting in a long standing pile of detritus and dust.

My PC has 3 cables out the back... DVI, Power, RJ45. You can lose one of those with wireless - if you want to use wireless all the time, I personally don't. Power is pretty essential. The DVI is the one cable you don't need on a laptop or tablet (my DVI is

" The problem is that when the computer becomes outdated, you have to dump a perfectly good screen."

Umm, we have these things called standards. I took a screen from a DV-6000 and threw it into a much older Toshiba Satellite. I'm using that screen right now to read your hilariously wrong words. The best part? I could take this Toshiba apart, and toss it inside my 32" Samsung A550 TV, and using the laptop connector cable plug it right in and it will work. I've done it before with my defunct DV-7 laptop.

I've always thought it was a bad idea to build the computer into the screen. The problem is that when the computer becomes outdated, you have to dump a perfectly good screen. I have LCD screens that I've used for many years with different computers as I upgrade the hardware.

And now all the computer screens have migrated to HDTV monitor aspect ratios.

It is my older LED screen that gets used because it is much taller and lets
me read more. The modern screens are always demanding one or
more mouse events to see content from top to bottom.

Web content managers should not bend to the demands of programmers to have
big rich displays to work on. The result looks great on their desktop but pisses
customers off that are smart enough to know...

Since the PC makers have now given early signs of freaking out about the tablet, can we expect more Frankenstein 8 pound, Mac monitor shaped, Frankenstein, 20 inch screen, Frankenstein, detachable flexi-keyboard, Frankenstein, rubberized to protect damage, Frankenstein, Windows 8, Frankenstein computers that cost $1200 and have an appeal to the consumer that Gasohol did in the 1970s as a replacment for Gasoline?

If the summary was unclear to you, what this is is actually a screen with a computer built into it.You can use it as a regular desktop computer by using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, or you can use it as a tablet.

It wouldn't be a bad idea if there was a good operating system that worked well as a desktop and as a tablet too.

I ordered a XPS 18 at launch to use to demo our website at a trade show. It was ordered because it was the largest screen "tablet" in production. At 5 pounds with an 18 inch screen expectations were high for the device. However on testing, the machine is very under powered. The i5 processor runs at 1.8Ghz, it is advertised to run "up to" 3.2Ghz and doesn't list base speed, and we upgraded to 8GB of RAM. The hard drive is advertised to have SSD available, however it is only really a boot drive, anything installed is run off of a traditional 5400 RPM drive. The battery life was average at best, 4 hours with moderate use.

We were using the tablet to demo our website, since a solid wifi signal or internet connectivity is not guaranteed at these types of shows, we have to rely on a VM running a LAMP server on the computer. Even with only a CLI version of CentOS running using 1GB of ram, and minimal processing specs, it caused the system to run at a crawl. It was painful and very disappointing. Needless to say, we returned the machine and went with the Lenovo Yoga 13 IdeaPad instead, and it did the job.

They brag about the display but it is only 1920x1080. We did better than that with CRTs in that size range over a decade ago. I know I'm not the only person who has been waiting for the resolutions to finally start taking off.

This has been asked and answered many times here. 1080 because that's what the lowest common denominators LCD makers put out these days. LCD^2..

Starting about 4 years ago in a laptop you could get this kind of screen size in a 1920 x 1200 resolution (WUXGA). [wikipedia.org] In the past 4 years I've had three laptops, two ASUS and One Alienware (Dell). Two of which supported 1200p. Unfortunately my latest ASUS only supports 1080p and as almost everybody on this website will tell you, it's a step backwards. While ther

Copied from another post I made: Go look on eBay for 27" IPS panel monitors. $400 gets you a 2560x1440 resolution monitor. Sure, they are Korean no name brands, but there are plenty of reviews out there that can tell you which ones are good.

This has been asked and answered many times here. 1080 because that's what the lowest common denominators LCD makers put out these days. LCD^2..

This has to be a custom-made screen pretty much only for this device. I mean, you don't see 1080p TVs under 22", and you don't see 1080p desktop monitors at 18" either, meanwhile 18" is too big for laptops. So it's not like they just shoved some mass-produced 1080p 18" panel in there. So if it's a custom job, why 1080p?

The laptops, while few, are available and not for everybody but they do exist as off the shelf and xoticpc for example puts them together. Trust me the Alienware models IMO are also discontinued and also boat anchors.

What's sad is seeing 18" (18.4) with 645p or 720p like the Qosimo model in that list. Those pixels have to be big and square. Kind of likelooking at old 8Bit Graphic [youtube.com]

Why is some mediocre product launch even news on Slashdot? Maybe I'm jaded on this, but it's not exactly new technology. Haven't tablet pc's running a Windows OS been around since windows XP was new? I can hear 2002 calling, they want their tablet back. I can't see anything remarkable about this. This is not news, this is advertising. What blows my mind is that some people post like they're excited about it. It makes me question giving up Slashdot altogether.

Why is some mediocre product launch even news on Slashdot? Maybe I'm jaded on this, but it's not exactly new technology. Haven't tablet pc's running a Windows OS been around since windows XP was new? I can hear 2002 calling, they want their tablet back. I can't see anything remarkable about this. This is not news, this is advertising. What blows my mind is that some people post like they're excited about it. It makes me question giving up Slashdot altogether.

I like the concept of a portable pc vs. a laptop. I don't travel as much as I used to and didnt want to spend 1500 on a decent laptop. Instead, I bought a 1080p 22 inch acer led, a itx fm2 motherboard, 16gb ram, AMD 4ghz 4 core APU, a ssd, and a 1tb hard drive all in compact mini-itx case. All of this plus a keyboard fit in a large backpack. Now it is heavy, takes a few minutes to assemble and disassemble, and does not have battery backup but I feel the increased productivity and price per performance is w

I'm waiting on them to bump to Haswell but I'm looking at this to replace my XPS 17. I'm a consultant and I usually just work off of an 13 inch ultrabook but I have times where I need something bigger for doing some of the analytical work. This would give me a larger screen and cut over 2 lbs at the same time.

*Supposedly* they don't have plans to refresh it with the Haswell this year. Hopefully Dell will get some decent feedback and update it with the Haswell, a video out for a second monitor, and whatever else the AVERAGE home user needs.

as many cores as I can cram in -as much RAM as I can cram in -as much SSD storage as I can cram in - - to a walkman sized box

a couple USB ports, one commodity, easily replaced DC power port

(stay with me here)

an LED-based projector unit built-in, maybe an HDMI port to help things along should I feel the crushing need to plug in a TV or monitor (or I can't find sixty diagonal inches of blank wall, and really where does that happen??)

My office was on the pre-launch wait list and we got some of the first XPS 18's Dell shipped. For your average person, with average computer needs, it's actually a really nice solution. First off, this really isn't meant to be used like a typical tablet, and is more of a "lap computer". The foldout legs allow it to work beautifully as a presentation piece (I've been using it to do R&D demos), and when reversed it actually makes a very nice tabletop touchscreen.

Is it the most powerful computer in the world? No. Mine is the i5 with 8Gb and it's performance is about average for a modern desktop computer. You're not going to run the latest games with everything cranked all the way up (the lack of discreet graphics puts an end to that), but my son plays SW:ToR and it averages about 40fps with everything turned up. That's nothing amazing, but it's really not bad either. You have to remember that the XPS 18 isn't meant to compete with powerful desktops...it's an Ultrabook in a tablet form factor, and it delivers Ultrabook level performance. When viewed through that lens, the performance is just fine. On the Windows partition, I've run everything from Office to Visual Studio with no real complaints.

The battery life on mine has been fairly good. From a full charge, it will do about 4.5-5 hours of light duty work (web browsing, etc) with the screen brightness turned down a bit. When my son was playing SW:TOR, he got about two hours out of it with the brightness all the way up. That's not the greatest, but you have to remember that we're talking about an 18" 1080 screen.

The portability is actually better than you would expect as well. You're not going to be walking around using it in your hand like an iPad, but it's very well balanced and much easier to handle than it looks. I purchased the messenger bag style case for mine, and usually carry it around like a laptop. When I'm moving around the room, I just tuck it under my arm, where it feels much lighter than its advertised 5lb weight. The back of the XPS 18 is metal, there's a heavy rubber bumper all the way around, and the "gator glass" screen is slightly flexible, which make it fairly durable. Mine has already taken a few falls without any marks or damage.

There are a couple of things I'm less than thrilled about. The power button is poorly placed and is exceptionally easy to accidentally press by hand. I had to reconfigure it in both Win8 and Xubuntu (yes, it dual boots just fine) to ignore inputs from the power button entirely. The foldout legs are well built and seem like they'll last a while, but Dell's folding mechanism uses a poorly designed magnetic holder. Basically they placed magnets on the back of the legs and then placed the regulatory stickers over the top of them to hold them in place. It took two weeks for the stickers on one to peel loose, after which the leg began flopping out on me. It was an easy fix with a bit of superglue, but it was a disappointing to see them cheap out on such a simple detail. Like others, I'm also disappointed in their choice to use a 5400RPM hard drive over a SSD, or even a 7200. The HDD is probably the biggest performance killer in the design. Finally, I'm irritated that, even after a month of tweaking, I haven't managed to get the touchscreen working in Xubuntu 12 LTS. I don't know what Dell did with the drivers for this thing, but none of the standard Linux touchscreen drivers work at all. Because of that, you can only use Linux on it when it's sitting at its base station with the physical keyboard and mouse. It makes a fine Xubuntu workstation when sitting on the base, but I'd really like to get the touchscreen working on it so I can use it as a tablet.

All in all though, I'm fairly satisfied with it. I'm not going to use it to replace my desktop, but since getting it a month ago I've nearly stopped using my previous tablet (Xoom) and have completely stopped carrying my Ultrabook around. My Apple wielding co-workers have largely reported the same. If Dell would offer this in a 15" version a

The purported advantage of a tablet over a laptop with a comparably sized screen is that the unconnected items put together, including the stand, are still lighter and thinner than some of the 10" laptops that companies were selling during the netbook fad. And yes, this thing has a battery, though in practice it might not last longer than a UPS.